Open Data
Let's Talk About Open Data
In the following video from the 2010 Ted Talk series, Tim Berners-Lee, who many describe as the inventor of the World Wide Web, called for governments, scientists and institutions to make their data openly available on the web.
Watch Tim Berners-Lee: The year open data went worldwide
We recommend this video E-learning module from the Publications Office of the European Union.
Open Data Glossary
Creative Commons: A non-profit organization founded in 2001 that promotes re-usable content by publishing a number of standard licences, some of them open (though others include a non-commercial clause), that can be used to release content for re-use, together with clear explanations of their meaning.
Hackathon: An event, usually over one or two days, where developers, subject experts and others come together to create apps, visualizations, and prototypes that aim to address problems in a particular domain, usually making heavy use of data. The hackathon is a popular format in the open source community.
Human Readable: Data in a format that can be conveniently read by a human. Some human-readable formats, such as PDF, are not machine-readable as they are not structured data, i.e. the representation of the data on the disk does not represent the actual relationships present in the data.
Machine-readable: Data in a data format that can be read and processed by a computer. Format examples include CSV, JSON, XML, etc.
Mash-up: A web page or application created by combining data or functionality from different sources.
Open Access: The principle that access to the published papers and other results of research, especially publicly-funded research, should be freely available to all. This contrasts with the traditional model where research is published in journals which charge subscription fees to readers. Besides benefits similar to the benefits of open data, proponents suggest that it is immoral to withhold potentially life-saving and valuable research from some readers who may be able to use or build on it. Open-access journals now exist and the interest of research funders is giving them some traction, especially in the sciences.
Open data: Data is open if it can be freely accessed, used, modified and shared by anyone for any purpose - subject only, at most, to requirements to provide attribution and/or share-alike. Specifically, open data is defined by the Open Definition ("the main international standard for open data and open data licences, providing principles and guidance for all things ‘open’”)
- Legally open: that is, available under an open (data) license that permits anyone freely to access, reuse and redistribute.
- Technically open: that is, that the data be available for no more than the cost of reproduction and in machine-readable and bulk form.
Open government: Open government, in line with the open movement generally, seeks to make the workings of governments transparent, accountable, and responsive to citizens. It includes the ideals of democracy, due process, citizen participation and open government data. A thorough approach to open government would also seek to enable citizen participation in, for example, the drafting and revising of legislation and budget-setting.
Open Source: Software for which the source code is available under an open licence. Not only can the software be used for free, but users with the necessary technical skills can inspect the source code, modify it and run their own versions of the code, helping to fix bugs, develop new features, etc. Some large open source software projects have thousands of volunteer contributors. The Open Definition was heavily based on the earlier Open Source Definition, which sets out the conditions under which software can be considered open source.
Public domain: Content to which copyright does not apply, for example because it has expired, is free for any kind of use by anyone and is said to be in the public domain. CC0, one of the licences of Creative Commons, is a ‘public domain dedication’ which attempts so far as possible to renounce all rights in the work and place it in the public domain.
Structured data: All data has some structure, but ‘structured data’ refers to data where the structural relation between elements is explicit in the way the data is stored on a computer disk. XML and JSON are common formats that allow many types of structure to be represented. The internal representation of, for example, word-processing documents or PDF documents reflects the positioning of entities on the page, not their logical structure, which is correspondingly difficult or impossible to extract automatically.
Source: opendatahandbook.org/glossary/en
